by Alwyn Turner
Newman had formerly been responsible for drama at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, where he had promoted the work of young writers including the future novelist Arthur Hailey and Bernard Slade (later to give us The Partridge Family), and had been part of the great era of television plays in North America in the mid 1950s. Arriving in 1958 to take over the existing ABC series Armchair Theatre, he began by exploring the London stage having, on an earlier visit, been to the Royal Court to see John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, a play whose claustrophobic domesticity and dissatisfaction with modern Britain was not dissimilar to that of Hancock’s Half Hour, though without the jokes. (Ray Galton and Alan Simpson paid tribute in a radio parody with Hancock entitled ‘Look Back in Hunger’.) Enthused by the possibilities that such an intimate and direct style of drama offered for television, Newman began to commission new work by the likes of Alun Owen, Harold Pinter and Angus Wilson. ‘The policy I adopted for Armchair Theatre was to do plays about contemporary Britain,’ he was later to explain. ‘No adaptations from theatre or literary sources were wanted. The plays had to be fast and exciting and concerned with the turning points in contemporary society.’ He cherished his reputation as the man who helped British drama make its move from the drawing room to the kitchen sink: ‘I am proud that I played some part in the recognition that the working man was a fit subject for drama, and not just a comic foil in a play on middle-class manners.’
Armchair Theatre was accorded a highly desirable programming slot, following on from one of ITV’s guaranteed ratings winners, the variety show Sunday Night at the London Palladium (so popular that some churches rescheduled their services to allow the flocks to watch), and the strand achieved impressive audiences. Harold Pinter’s first play for television, A Night Out (1960), was the most viewed programme in the week that it was broadcast, an achievement repeated later that year by Ray Rigby’s The Cupboard. Actual viewing figures, as opposed to relative chart positions, are difficult to determine for the era, but at the time the Daily Mail claimed that the audience for the series exceeded 16 million, while the Daily Mirror put it at 21 million.
Despite its embrace of social realism, Armchair Theatre had a wider remit than was sometimes acknowledged, and included some original works of science fiction. (‘I’ve always been a sucker for science,’ admitted Newman.) Donald Giltinan’s The Man Out There (1961) was a grim tale of an astronaut, played by Patrick McGoohan, on a doomed mission, while Jimmy Sangster’s I Can Destroy the Sun (1958) and James Forsyth’s Underground (1958) both dealt with the threat of nuclear weapons. The latter, set on the London Underground in the aftermath of a nuclear explosion, was one of the last plays in the strand to go out live, its broadcast being overshadowed by the heart attack and death during the performance of one of the actors, Gareth Jones. The show continued, largely under the direction of a production assistant named Verity Lambert, with Jones’s role being hurriedly written out. The success of these and other plays helped persuade Newman to accept a programme proposal from Irene Shubik, a script editor on Armchair Theatre, and in 1962 the company launched Out of this World, an anthology series of one-off science fiction dramas. It was a significant moment in British television, partly because it opened up new avenues for young dramatists, including Clive Exton and Leon Griffiths as well as Terry Nation, and partly because it arguably did more to popularise contemporary science fiction in Britain than anything since the heyday of H.G. Wells.
There had, of course, been broadcast science fiction in Britain before, and much of it had been highly popular. In 1954 the BBC had shown Nigel Kneale’s adaptation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, turning a novel with respectable sales into a paperback best-seller and a modern classic: the second broadcast (not strictly speaking a repeat, since it was another live performance) attracted what was then the largest audience for a British television broadcast. Kneale’s own The Quatermass Experiment the previous year had launched the eponymous character, and two more serials featuring Professor Quatermass were to follow later in the decade, again finding large audiences of over eight million; all three were subsequently made into movies by Hammer Films. Even on the wireless, Radio Luxembourg had in 1951 catapulted into space Dan Dare (‘pilot of the future’) from the Eagle comic, and for five years he had been central to the station’s post-war rebuilding of its audience, despite the incongruity of his daily serial being sponsored by Horlicks. The popularity of Dan Dare was sufficient to prompt the BBC into launching Journey Into Space (1953–9), created by Charles Chilton, which regularly achieved audiences of two and a half million.
But these were isolated pieces and appeared to have little impact in terms of promoting science fiction among the general public. Even as late as 1962, the year after the celebrated television series A for Andromeda, the BBC felt that the opportunities were limited, that science fiction was, in the words of an internal report, ‘too remote, projected too far away from common humanity in the here-and-now, to evoke interest in the common audience’. The report’s summary was not encouraging: ‘Our conclusion therefore is that we cannot recommend any existing SF stories for TV adaptation.’
While the genre was building a substantial following in other countries – particularly the United States and the Soviet Union – it languished in Britain, seemingly unable to break through either to a mass market or to intellectual respectability in the way that, say, detective fiction had. ‘In the late 1950s,’ J.G. Ballard was later to write, ‘science fiction was generally regarded as not much better than the comic strips.’ There was a small hardcore of support, its numbers perhaps suggested by the 5,000 members of the Science Fiction Book Club, though the American magazine Astounding Science Fiction claimed a British circulation in 1959 of 35,000, and there were a handful of home-grown magazines, one of which – New Worlds, edited by John Carnell – conducted a survey of its readers in the middle of the decade. ‘Ninety-five per cent are male, their average age 31,’ it was reported. ‘More than a third were technicians of some kind and six per cent were in the RAF. Nine per cent had been to university.’ There was also anecdotal evidence to suggest that readers had a marked political inclination to the left, reflected in the fact that, among the national newspapers, it was the Observer and the Guardian who were most supportive, the former running a competition in 1954 for new short stories set in the year 2500.
There were, however, signs of change by the end of the decade. In 1959 Kingsley Amis demonstrated that he was a better critic than he was a novelist, with a celebrated series of lectures at Princeton University on the current standing of the tradition, subsequently published as New Maps of Hell. In the same year the British Science Fiction Association was launched in an attempt to combat the negative image; the scale of their task was such that even the name was contentious and some argued against the use of the term ‘science fiction’ at all. The support of established writers including Amis, Angus Wilson, Robert Conquest and Edmund Crispin began to attract more mainstream coverage, though there was still some confusion over what was seen as the divided nature of the writing and its followers. ‘The most baffling characteristic of this vastly uninhibited conference,’ noted the Guardian correspondent who attended the Association’s 1961 gathering, ‘was the peculiar mixture of juvenile delight in gimmicks and facetious humour with a great deal of serious discussion.’ The imagery of the 1930s pulp magazines, dealing with what Amis referred to as ‘man-eating, death-ray-dealing aliens’ and commonly referred to by the shorthand phrase ‘bug-eyed monsters’, was proving hard to shake off, even if the genre was now attracting those with a proselytising belief that, in Ballard’s words, ‘science fiction was the true literature of the twentieth century’. It offered, argued Wilson, ‘more vitality, a more expanding prospect, than any other branch of fiction today’, despite the fact that, at its worst, it was ‘the most pulpy product of a pulp-producing age’. The problem was convincing the rest of society that there was intelligent life beyond the pulp.
The chief
exception in 1950s Britain, the one writer capable of breaking out from the limited fan base into widespread popularity, was John Wyndham, whose work harked back to the tradition of H.G. Wells and was sometimes disparaged by the more self-consciously literary practitioners of the genre. His 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids was reported to have sold over 100,000 copies by the end of the decade, and had been broadcast on BBC radio both as a reading, in 1953, and as a six-part drama in 1957, before being filmed in 1962. That book had been followed by a series of other best-sellers, including The Kraken Wakes (1953), The Chrysalids (1955) and The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), the latter of which was also filmed, in 1960, under the more sensationalist title of Village of the Damned. Unsurprisingly, therefore, it was one of his stories, ‘Dumb Martian’ (published in 1952), that was selected by Irene Shubik to launch Out of this World; though in the event the play was screened within the Armchair Theatre strand on Sunday 24 June 1962 as a trail for the new series, which started officially the following Saturday.
Out of this World took its title from a series of anthologies edited by Amabel Williams-Ellis and Mably Owen, and published by Blackie from 1960 onwards. The first volume had included work by the likes of Arthur C. Clarke, Arthur Porges and Fredric Brown, as well as the obligatory Wyndham, and the thirteen-week television series that bore the same name was to feature a similarly diverse collection of writers, among them the Americans Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov and Clifford D. Simak. In all three cases, it was the first time that any of their work had been adapted for the screen, whether cinema or television, and thus the first time that it was encountered by a sizeable audience in Britain. Shubik later commented that ‘science fiction of the “adult”, as opposed to the “bug-eyed monster”, kind had always been a pet subject of mine’, and her selection of material, assisted by John Carnell of New Worlds, was to set new standards for the treatment of the genre. Her intentions were strictly serious, and hinted at the campaigning spirit of Ballard and Wilson. ‘I think everyone is interested in the idea of life on another planet and what the future holds,’ she remarked, as she promoted the show. ‘I’m fed-up with kitchen sink drama and plays about who goes to bed with whom. Science fiction at least has a philosophical speculation behind it which I find fascinating.’
Terry Nation’s involvement in the series – he adapted two existing short stories and contributed an original tale – came as something of a surprise to his colleagues at Associated London Scripts. ‘I can’t really remember him being interested in science fiction,’ commented Ray Galton, and Beryl Vertue was similarly unaware of his interest: ‘I don’t remember him talking about it hugely.’ Fortunately Nation’s friend, Clive Exton, thought he knew better. A stalwart of Armchair Theatre – six of his plays were screened in the strand in 1960 alone – Exton was already being hailed by The Times as ‘one of the most subtle and individual among the new generation of dramatists produced by television’, and he had earlier encouraged Nation to write Uncle Selwyn. Somewhat more helpfully, when he was commissioned in 1962 to write ‘Dumb Martian’ for Out of this World, he suggested to Shubik that Nation was a science fiction aficionado and would be ideal for the series. Nation was later to admit that this was overstating the case (‘I had nothing to back this up with at all’), for he was out of touch with modern science fiction and had never adapted anyone else’s work, but he made a suitable impression when he met Shubik and he was sent away with a story to adapt.
Only one episode of Out of this World – Leo Lehman’s dramatisation of Asimov’s ‘Little Lost Robot’ – has survived, but from contemporary reviews and the memories of those involved, it is evident that Nation largely stayed faithful to his source material. The first of his adaptations was Philip K. Dick’s story ‘Imposter’ (1953), set on a future Earth that is engaged in a deadly and protracted war with unknown forces from the Alpha Centauri star system, known as Outspacers. One of Earth’s most important research scientists, Roger Carter (called Spence Olham in the original), is on the verge of a major breakthrough in the development of a new weapon, when he is suddenly arrested on suspicion of being a robotic replica who has killed the human Carter, and who is concealing in his chest cavity a bomb that will destroy the project he is working on. Unable to prove that he is who he knows himself to be, Carter escapes custody and hunts down the imposter, eventually finding a dead body in a crashed Outspacer ship. At which point he realises that the dead man is the real Carter and that therefore he must indeed be the robot. That realisation is the trigger for the detonation of the bomb he is carrying inside himself.
The second adaptation was of Clifford D. Simak’s ‘Immigrant’ (1954), a story that lent itself less readily to television, being a slower-paced, more deliberately didactic piece that lacks the dramatic drive of ‘Imposter’. For nearly a hundred years the best and brightest humans from Earth have been emigrating to the planet Kimon, but still virtually nothing is known about their destination, save that it seems blessed with fabulous mineral wealth. The Kimonians are an advanced species, further down the evolutionary road than humans, adept at telepathy and telekinesis, but they have no desire to establish diplomatic relations with any other planet, and are extremely choosy about who they allow to visit their planet: only those with the highest IQ scores are considered and even then, following years of study, only one in a thousand taking the final tests is accepted. None of those who have emigrated have ever returned; they confine themselves to sending money home in letters that tell of the extraordinary wages paid, but reveal nothing of their life on Kimon.
The story follows Seldon Bishop, one of the few who are accepted, as he endeavours to make a new life in this ‘galactic El Dorado’. The material rewards are all that he expected, and the standard of living is luxurious in the extreme, but it doesn’t take long to discover why previous immigrants have been so reticent in their accounts of the place. For the Kimonians regard humans as being on a level somewhere between household pets and playmates for their children: ‘You might have a doctorate on Earth, but still be no more than a kindergarten youngster when you got to Kimon.’ Rather than admit this fact, the humans on Kimon privately nurse their wounded pride, and engage in the traditional expatriate activities of sport and drinking. Yet, as Bishop discovers, for those prepared to adopt the correct attitude, there is hope: ‘There is only one thing that will crack this planet and that is humility.’ And finally the Kimonian project becomes clear to him. They want to provide the opportunity for future human evolution, to teach those who wish to be taught, those who are prepared to accept that as yet they know nothing and that their schooldays are only just beginning. The theme of a wiser, older civilisation taking humanity under its nurturing wing was not unusual in Simak’s work.
Of the two stories, there is little doubt where Nation’s sympathies lay. The simple narrative of ‘Imposter’, driven by action rather than philosophy, was much more to his taste than the ruminative fantasy of Simak, as was Dick’s pessimism; elements of the tale – the perpetual state of war and the concept of a robotic double – were to return in his subsequent writing. His own contribution to the series, ‘Botany Bay’, was certainly more in the mould of Dick. Set in a psychiatric institution, it depicted evil aliens taking over the bodies of the inmates with, as The Times’s reviewer reported, ‘an ingenious twist’ in which ‘we were made to realize that we ourselves, the inhabitants of Earth, were the sinister intruders on some simpler future world: that not only were the wrong ’uns winning, but they were us after some further centuries of decadence.’
The series was a success in terms both of ratings and critical acceptance. It attracted larger audiences than the BBC’s science fiction offering for the summer – The Andromeda Breakthrough, a sequel to Fred Hoyle’s A for Andromeda the previous year – and there was widespread praise. ‘The level of writing and direction has been encouragingly high,’ said The Times; ‘certainly the most intelligent and best written of its genre since Quatermass’, approved Kinematograph Weekly; while the Y
orkshire Evening Post went one better: ‘the most accomplished thing of its kind TV has yet produced’. The Daily Mail was quick to praise its ultimate creator: ‘the series as a whole has been surprisingly good. Much of the triumph belongs to ABC’s story editor Irene Shubik – one of the few women to get real satisfaction out of science fantasy. Miss Shubik is an enthusiast, the venture was a labour of love for her, and it showed.’ For Nation himself, it had the added benefit of allowing him to work with one of his great Hollywood heroes, since each episode was introduced by the legendary horror actor Boris Karloff. ‘That was a great moment,’ remembered Kate Nation, ‘when he met Boris Karloff.’
The other beneficiary from the success of the show was Sydney Newman, who had shown that he could spin off hit series from Armchair Theatre, first with Armchair Mystery Thriller (1960) and now with Out of this World. His standing within the industry was so high that the BBC, desperately trying to catch up with its independent rival, recruited him to become its own head of drama in early 1963. BBC SIGNS ITV ‘DUSTBIN’ MAN, read the headline in the Daily Mail and, keen to cement his reputation as the nation’s chief purveyor of social realism, Newman created for the corporation The Wednesday Play, which was to prove even more controversial than his work on ITV. In his new role, he was also responsible for the drama output on the new channel, BBC2, that was due to launch in 1964, following the recommendations of the Pilkington Report. And one of those he recruited to staff this expansion was Irene Shubik, who became the script editor on Story Parade, a series of single dramas adapted from contemporary novels, ‘a sort of anthology of new fictional writing’.
